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Asus has launched its Tinker Board SBC in the U.S. for $60, featuring a quad-A17 RK3288 with 2GB RAM, a 40-pin RPi connector, and an updated TinkerOS 1.8.
The Asus Tinker Board, which launched in the UK in January for 46 Pounds ($58) is now selling on Amazon in the U.S. for $59.99. The Raspberry Pi-like Tinker Board is the first community backed SBC from a major PC manufacturer. The specs do not appear to have changed, but the device now has an updated 1.8 version of Asus’ Debian Linux-based TinkerOS, and Asus has posted some updated detail views since our last story.

Asus Tinker Board
(click images to enlarge)

The 85.6 x 56mm Tinker Board’s SBC footprint, layout, and features are very close to that of the Raspberry Pi, including the much copied 40-pin expansion connector. However, the quad-core, 1.8GHz Rockchip RK3288 is claimed to be almost twice as fast as the RPi 3’s Broadcom SoC, and offers a more powerful Mali T760 GPU. Its Cortex-A17 cores are 32-bit, as opposed to 64-bit, however, so the SoC may be less future proof for coming 64-bit applications.

Other advantages over the RPi 3 include twice the RAM at 2GB LPDDR3, and support for upscaled 4K/30fps playback. The Tinker Board also has dedicated 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet instead of a 10/100Mbps port that shares bandwidth with USB.

Tinker Board detail views
(click images to enlarge)

Other features are much like the RPi 3, including WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, microSD, 4x USB 2.0 ports. and a micro-USB port. It also has HDMI, MIPI-CSI, and -DSI interfaces, and a similar 40-pin expansion connector, although there are no claims for Raspberry Pi expansion board compatibility. The board is available with schematics, 2D and 3D drawings, and other open-spec resources.

The only current image available for the Tinker Board is the Debian-based, LXDE desktop ready TinkerOS, which was just updated to TinkerOS 1.8. (An Android version is in the works.) TinkerOS 1.8 is based on the latest Debian 9 core, and includes an optimized Chromium web browser, Python and Scratch coding apps, and a media player that was co-developed with Rockchip. TinkerOS is currently required for the upscaled 4K playback.

Further information

The Tinker Board is available in the U.S. at Amazon for $59.99 with free shipping. More information may be found at the Asus Tinker Board website.

My question about this board is, does it have video drivers which are generally useful to whatever programs you wish to run, or do you need to be running the media player included to take advantage of the GPU? Open source video drivers are so much more future proof than the kernel version specific blobs or the completely missing video acceleration in some of these devices.